Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Has "Good Morning America" Lost its Mind and Its Integrity

LondonI write this from London so I don't know if this segment has aired already but I am just flabbergasted.

I understand that GMA is going to run a segment featuring Herman Rosenblat, who lied repeatedly about his Holocaust experience, and his film producer, Harris Salomon, who told me he knows more about the Holocaust than I do [could be... but I somehow doubt it since he was peddling this as a true story for a long time]

Even more egregiously, Salomon tried to silence Professor Ken Waltzer from publishing his own research on this matter. Salomon, wrote to the president and deans of Michigan State trying to intimidate them into silencing Waltzer.

Now he is trying, once again, to make a buck off of Rosenblat's lies and falsehoods.

Over the past year friends of the Rosenblats have written to me in concern about what this has done to them. I expressed some sympathy. I thought they were pretty off balance folks but so be it....

Now they go on with their story but have issued no apologies to the myriad of people -- including their own family -- to whom they have caused great pain.

And Good Morning America becomes a tool by giving their sleazy producer publicity.

6 comments:

You have not lost your mind, Professor Lipstadt, the show will air in the USA on Wednesday morning. A YouTube video now making the rounds on the Internet shows Mr Rosenblat being interviewed by someone offscreen. Here:

It pre-empts the ABC-TV show and might even be better, as it is very revealing.

Ken Waltzer is quoted as saying : " their lying and dissimulating are actually understandable. Less understandable is the widespread belief in their story--by the culture makers" (1)

I quite agree, although I am not sure if their mental confusion qualifies as "lying".

I can't see how I could blame someone who faced acute suffering in his childhood to have some confusion in his mind, mixing up dreams and reality.

I assume that the part of the story where Herman Rosenblat tells that he had a dream of his mother telling him she would send him an angel is true. It sort of makes sense, psychologically, that he later would have associated the woman he fell in love with and married, with this dream of an angel.

When the reality which is faced is too difficult to accept, it can happen that the mind produces "lies" or "dreams", and that the subject believes his own "lies" or "dreams". Mixing up dreams and reality is also something perfeclty normal among young children, even in a childhood without any particular suffering (2). It does not seem totally impossible that this mind propensity to create "lies" or "dreams" could have perpetuated itself into adulthood, long after the actual suffering in childhood.

Deborah and others screening here, the NY Daily News wrote today, and it was completely erroneous:

"But, a US$25 million movie based on the bogus book called "Flower of the Fence," and starring Maia Morgenstern and Thomas Sangster, is still in the works."

First, there is no cast assembled, there are no funds for the movie, not even US$100, let alone 25 milllion USD, and the movie is only "in the works" in the mind of a certain someone. I know this reporter, Corky Siemasko, he is a good reporter, but he must have been busy last night because he never checked his facts, which is par for the course on this while sinister episode from day one. Nobody checked facts, not Oprah, not Penguin, not agent, not anyone, and event he Good Moring America reporter didn't ask tought questions, it was a pure PR set up and GMA took the bait. But to repeat, there is no cast, there is no Hollywood director signed on, and there is no funding. This was all admitted on ISraeli Public Radio last year by the man in charge.

But there will be likely more TV interviews, more PR press releases, and attempts to publish a book. But I predict the book will never appear in print. And the new publisher will likely get burned, as Penguin did. There are people invovled here who have no souls.

The man behind all this called my editor in Canada last night and asked that my recent news article about the ABC TV interview be spiked and that his name be taken off my story where I was quoting his name being mentioned in Dr Lipstadt's very blog post here, and my editor was cowed into submission by this man and she spiked my story and cut it without even asking me first if what i wrote was true or not, she just took this man's threats and did what he cowed her into doing, and i quit my job there and will never write for that website again. Not that is paid me at all, they never paid me, i did my writing there as a public service, some would say public dis-service, SMILE, but anyway, another story about how people making phone calls and threats can try to upend this world of ours. and it aint over till the lady sings.

I lost my job trying to tell the truth, due to a cowardly editor. Pressured into spiking my very straight-forward newsw article about the GMA interview and its aftermath. You will never read it now because it has been removed from the website.